On the evening of 20 July 1860, a meteor fragmented as it grazed the Earth's atmosphere, producing a "meteor procession" that inspired a painting by Frederic Church and a poem by Walt Whitman that ends with the following lines:

Year of comets and meteors transient and strange! – lo! even here, one equally transient and strange!

As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this book,

What am I myself but one of your meteors?

(Image: Courtesy of Judith Filenbaum Hernstadt)

Previous researchers suggested that the poem "Year of Meteors (1859-60)" in Whitman's collection Leaves of Grass may have referred to the Leonid meteor storm of 1833 (illustrated). But that date is at odds with the poem's, and Whitman described the two events very differently.

(Image: From the collection of Don Olson)

The meteor procession of 20 July 1860 was the subject of hundreds of news articles in North America, including a front page story in Harper's Weekly. "I think this may be the most observed, and most documented, single meteor event in history," says astronomical sleuth Donald Olson of Texas State University in San Marcos. "From the Great Lakes to New England – every town that had a newspaper wrote about the 1860 meteor." Despite this, the procession had apparently faded so much from memory by the mid-twentieth century that researchers were not sure what Whitman's poem referred to.

(Image: From the collection of Don Olson)

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Only two other meteor processions have been recorded – one in 1783 and another, the most spectacular known, on 9 February 1913. The artist Gustav Hahn captured the 1913 procession near the constellation Orion.

(Image courtesy of University of Toronto Archives)

The meteor procession of 20 July 1860 passed from west to east over a ground track covering more than 1600 kilometres before the space debris appeared to escape from the Earth's atmosphere over the Atlantic Ocean.